


Deliverance

by ImpOfPerversity



Series: Devastation-verse [2]
Category: Baroque Cycle - Neal Stephenson, Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: 1 Sentence Fiction, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-07-13
Updated: 2004-07-13
Packaged: 2018-10-21 06:50:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10679967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImpOfPerversity/pseuds/ImpOfPerversity





	Deliverance

Jack Shaftoe awoke ingloriously sprawled on rough wooden boards, less splintery -- and less acridly pungent -- than the average Southwark tavern floor, though (as he saw when he opened sticky eyes) stained blacker than the filthiest surface on which he'd ever slept; through the pitchy timber he could feel the flex and groan of a ship under way, and above him ropes (stays, halyards and the like, thought Jack, scowling as the proper terminology sprung unbidden and unwanted to the precarious forefront of his conscious mind) sang and thrummed with tension; men's voices shouted in different tongues, of which Jack recognised some (French, Portuguese, Qwghlmian, and Kernow) but by no means all; and, as he narrowed his eyes against the painful sun, trying to determine whether its glare was merely due to an illusory morning freshness (yes, there was east, so morning it must be), a sailor -- stripe-backed, naked to the waist, dressed in disreputable duck-cloth trousers such as the Lascars wore, his hair plaited down his back in a tar-clubbed queue -- stepped over Jack where he lay, glanced back at him over his shoulder, registered his state of wakefulness, and (grinning to show bad teeth) said cheerfully in French, "Welcome aboard the Black Pearl!": which greeting meant very little to Jack Shaftoe at that moment, for though the ship's name seemed strangely familiar -- had he, perhaps, heard it in a play? -- he could no more place it in its proper context than he could place himself in the context of said Black Pearl; that is, he'd no idea of why he might have embarqued upon such a vessel, or where she might be bound, never mind the nature of her cargo or her business; all he knew was that his body comprised one solid ache, albeit differently shaded, from waist to knees, and when he tried to think about that ache and how he might have acquired it, the morning breeze felt cooler on his face as though he were blushing, as though there was something simultaneously embarrassing and arousing about the origin of that ache: and now that he came to think on it, hadn't there been something about ... Jack lost the direction of his thought, as seemed to happen to him more and more frequently of late, no doubt through the insidious under-minings of the French pox; but on this particular occasion it was the thought -- nay, the remembered sense -- of cold blue lips against his own mouth, that and the vague notion that he'd had a kiss that was more fiery by far in recent times, perhaps as lately as last night; and while he was trying to snag that fragment of memory from a stream of consciousness that flowed as fast as the broad River on which the Black Pearl sailed, the ship came about, and Jack saw, high on a forested hill above the river-bend, a bright red-brick building which had not been there when he’d played (and, later, thieved) here as a child: and, in acknowledging his first sight of the new house, Jack recognised that he had been here before, and from that cognisance sprouted a whole jungle of remembrances, and there amongst them all the single bloom of the salient event from said childhood, viz, what might have been said (by the tender-hearted and sentimental) to be childhood's end; the mutual realisation, dawning upon himself and Bob in the bottom of a longboat in the middle of this very stretch of Thames, one long-ago night long after midnight, that their dear brother Dick was deceased; and that (far worse) they'd played no small part in his demise, having yanked the rope that'd held him above water; yes, that scene, with two boys snivelling over the corpse of a blue-skinned third, and the rest of the mudlarks carrying on their business around them, must have taken place near here, where the river broadened and wound past Greenwich Palace, with its Hospital and that red house (must be the King’s latest Observatory) high on the hill; and Jack wondered if some rich idle Dutchman with a prospective-glass and a fine wig might be looking down from that Observatory upon Jack himself, sprawled on the black deck of the Black Pearl, blinking stupidly against the sun and the wind: wondered, too, whether his state of confusion would be obvious to an impartial observer, and whether such an observer (assuming he had taken some, doubtless prurient and unsavoury, interest in Jack Shaftoe) might in fact have watched him from the moment he'd come aboard the ship; that boarding must've been upriver in Southwark, surely, and perhaps there was a reason that he couldn't recall coming aboard, perhaps it was too soon to remember that it hadn't been entirely of his own free will; come to think of it, there’d been a blindfold, or rather an odoriferous charcoal-coloured bag over his head, and a generous dose of rum, and a sinewy grip as inescapable as irons; something else, too, that he couldn't quite pin down, something -- someone? -- slippery and sly (why did 'slippery' send a bolt of excitement through his belly?) that had played with him, outplayed him, made him lose it, made him pour ... Jack Shaftoe swore aloud, disbelievingly, and twisted around (uncaring of hurrying feet, uncoiling rope, or the sharp barking commands that herded the crew from stem to stay to stern) to sit upright against the gunwale, trying to ignore the pain in his arse, trying even harder to pretend that the jolt of pleasure -- ‘nay, Jack’, (he could almost hear the reassurance, in a voice, that was at once strange and oddly, comfortably familiar), ‘nay, Jack, not mere pleasure, but exultation ... euphoria ... carnal deliverance!’ -- that discharged itself through the spongy marrow of his bones had nothing to do with that deep, warm ache within his very body; horribly aware that the indistinct fragments of memory and experience -- like the tiles of that Antique mosaic that he'd seen unearthed one day whilst lounging around, observing an Irish work-gang digging the foundations of the new alms-houses at Vauxhall -- could all too easily be reassembled into a pattern that depicted his seduction, ravishment and subsequent abduction by one Jack Sparrow, pirate and sodomite; the best night Jack Shaftoe'd had since that Incident in Dunkirk that had curtailed his career as a rake and bestowed upon him the sobriquet of Half-Cocked; that, in short, Jack's role over the past twenty-four hours had been not Hero but Ingenue, a part more commonly played on the boards of the Globe, the Rose, et cetera, by a bosomy lass with her laces all undone, revealing luscious curves of roseate female flesh whilst bewailing her lost virginity and fending off her suitors with well-placed slaps and well-pitched shriek: and oh, Jack felt like shrieking now, not for those final shreds of physical innocence of which he’d happily let Sparrow relieve him, but for the wasted years of bleak unfulfilment, wasted for the simple fact that no one had ever told him that sodomy was not to be borne, but to be sought.


End file.
